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Trigger warning: I am about to use facts. If you are a conservative, the following will be foreign to your way of thinking and therefore will induce apoplexy. You should probably stop reading NOW.

Looky there, my pay check has changes, as promised! Trump and the Republicans have been incessantly, obsessively, and noisily claiming that we, the 99 percent, will see real benefits, as a result of Republican changes to Obama-era public policy, in three major economic areas that loom large for us: salary, federal taxes, and health insurance premiums. Let’s call them on their fakery and see just how these stack up when we consider the facts of a typical upper middle class case.

I got a pay raise! Due to a purported “cost of living” increase, my (civil servant) salary went up by 1.68%. But inflation in 2017 was 2.1%. Result: my new pay rate, in constant money (2017 dollars), is smaller by 0.41%, meaning I make $17.43 less per biweekly pay check than before.

My federal taxes changed! Oh, gee, it looks nothing like what Trash Trump and the Robber Republicans have trumpeted, since I am a member of the 99 percent. Result: as a proportion of my salary, my federal tax rate went up by 0.18%.

My health insurance rate changed! Surprise, surprise, it went up. In 2017, my biweekly premium was $240.77 (or 5.6 percent of my 2017 salary). The 2018 premium is $257.81 (or 5.9 percent of my 2018 salary). In 2017 dollars, that’s $252.51. So my health insurance rate went up by (252.51-240.77)/240.77 = 5.48 percent in constant dollars, which is par for what others like me have seen.

The upshot: the net change of my biweekly income due to these three factors — salary, federal taxes, health insurance — expressed in 2017 dollars, is a decrease of $35.01. This is a 2017 salary fractional decrease of 1.0 percent. So, where are my promised “real benefits” due to Republican policy changes from the Obama era?

Gee, thanks, Trash Trump and Robber Republicans, you cretins, fucktards(*), and liars. Every one of your claims and bragging points is FALSE. As is always the case with you. You are liars. You are never not liars. Did you really think we would somehow fail to notice your trademark fraud, mendacity, and trumpery?

As my (Republican) dad would have put it, you bet your sweet bippy I will remember this — and your uncountable(**) earlier and ongoing cretinous acts against the American people — come November.

(*) fucktard (noun): A person of unbelievable, inexcusable, and indescribable stupidity (stupidity being defined as “knowing better yet doing it wrong anyway”). Note: a character trait, not a physical or physiological defect or shortcoming.

(**) uncountable (adjective): said of a set which has more elements than the set of integers.

You lost. It was not a fair contest, since you Republicans prevented thousands upon thousands of those people from exercising their constitutional right to vote. Even so, you lost.

Not so fast, you say? Okay, sure. I can be all lawyery and numbery and elitist and argue totally for you and see where that gets us. This will prove you won, as is only right and fair and just, right? Well, no, but what the hey, I haven’t had my morning covfefe yet, so here we go.

Blanket Declaration*:

Now, let’s just declare, up front and all obvious-like, that ALL assumptions below are true and in your favor. You might have won after all! (Finally got your attention, didn’t I?)

* That means this is important for you to remember, Roy.

The military votes have yet to be counted. But, taking the tallied votes as reported by 100% of precincts, which is the overwhelming majority of possible legal votes, 49.92% voted for Jones, 48.38% voted for the asshole and child molester—for a difference of 1.54%—and 1.70% threw their vote away in justifiable disgust. A result that differs by 0.5% or less triggers a recount.

Guess what, Roy? You can’t guess? Here, I’ll make it easy: 1.54 is bigger than 0.5—in anybody’s version of reality, including even your magical Land of Nod.

Let’s try another way to view it, which I know is familiar to you and which even someone like you might grok: I believe in my heart of hearts—my heart of hearts, Roy!—that the simple, second-grade math above is true. So, therefore, it is true: you lost. There, does that convince you?

There’s wiggle room!, you say. Well, I’m pretty sure I heard something like that somewhere in your spittle-flinging ranting. Okay—we’re now going to start using the blanket declaration above—suppose ALL of the eligible military voters sent in ballots, and further suppose that ALL of those ballots are valid, and, even further, suppose ALL of those valid ballots were cast for you, the pedophile. Then we have 49.60% for Jones, 48.71% for the Alabamer prevert, and 1.69% for legitimate disgust. 49.60 minus 48.71 is 0.89, which in anybody’s version of reality is also bigger than 0.5. You still lost.

But wait, there could be more, Mr. Moore! (I figure you could never actually think, never mind think of this next possibility all by your widdle sewf, but hey, I’m a nice guy, capable of empathy (I know that word is alien to your kind, but bear with me here), and you’re pitifully pathetic even for a Republican, so here, this is me helping you out.) Suppose, after election officials—granted, election officials work for the evil gubment, so they’re pinko commie socialists committed to restoration of the Great Conspiracy—suppose all of them see the Light of your Righteous Cause and examine each write-in ballot and “discover” that, to everybody’s shock, the ballots are ALL valid, and that they are ALL for Moore the Misogynist. Let’s further suppose, as before, that ALL eligible military voted, ALL those ballots are also one hundred percent valid, and ALL are for precioussss little you.

The probability of this is not significantly different from zero, but let’s suppose all of it is true anyway, since you believe in miracles. Yes, I know, you don’t know what those big therefore bad and evil words mean, so you hatesss them, you do—trust me, that’s okay, I know you’d ignore the concept even if the words consisted of just monosyllabic grunts, your native language. Anyway, the tally then would be 49.60% for Jones and 50.40% for you Mr. Monster! That differs by 0.80%, which is again bigger than 0.5%, but this time it’s in your favor!

Yay! You win! You win!

Just kidding—you know every bit as well as the rest of us that you lost. As is true for everybody of your mental-midget ilk (that means people like you), you’re a shitty liar.

You’re welcome anyway to wait for the secret agent socialist election officials to examine the write-in ballots, and for that commie USPS to finish delivering the military ballots to the secret agents for tallying, and see if all those improbable things above come true. I have lots of popcorn, and I’m pretty sure everybody else does, too, so we’re all good with that.

Those impossible things won’t happen, though. Sorry-not-sorry, but miracles don’t exist. Reality does. So suck it up and be a Marlboro Man, asshole: you lost. As even Mike Huckabee—Mike Huckabee—said this morning,

“In elections everyone does NOT get a trophy.”

See those quotation marks? That means Huckabee really did write that.

Now, about that miracle recount for which you still insist on throwing a tantrum. Do you even grasp, yet, how dull-witted and infantile this makes you look? No, of course you don’t. Privation of even minimal cognition and mental agility is your problem. (Your therapist can explain this to you.) As mentioned, you don’t qualify for an automatic recount on the taxpayer’s dime. But you could still pay for a recount out of your own pocket, right? People have done that, and you can, too, right? Especially since you’ve been wronged—wronged, how dare they!

Well . . . WRONG, dude. You were seeking federal office. That matters in Alabama. You don’t get to demand a recount for a margin greater than 0.5%, even if you could convince some idiot to pay for it for you (assuming that’s even legal—but remember the blanket declaration at the top of this letter). Alabama state law says this, and it’s crystal clear on the matter. If you have any groveling flunkies left, get one to look it up for you.

Now, hey you, mister, can’t you read? You’ve got to have a shirt and tie to get a seat You can’t even watch, no you can’t eat You ain’t supposed to be here The sign said you got to have a membership card to get inside Ugh! Sign, sign, everywhere a sign Blockin’ out the …

Republican politicians cynically abandon every American value, values we the people—some of us—hold dear. You who voted for Donald Trump and for other high-office Republicans: you are lost, only half a step behind your callous leaders, none of whom give a damn about you.

You voted into the highest office in the land a misogynist bigot and con man, an ignorant billionaire and narcissistic pig who spent his entire life crushing people just like you, without a second’s thought.

You excuse yourself for voting for this monster, for inflicting this hideous thing on our country. You tell yourself that it’s okay because you are mad at … at … you can’t legitimately articulate what you are mad at or why, can you? You excuse yourself, but you have fooled nobody—not even yourself. Somewhere inside, you know that you have done something terrible.

You make me sick.

Look at who you have become, what you have abandoned. Look at it, and remember, over the coming weeks and months and years. Your thoughtless action identifies you with Trump, the vile putridity that he stands for, that the Republicans stand for, and has put you as far from this, our America, as is humanly possible. You own this. Read, and be ashamed for what you have done, for what you chose, for what you have become. Because this is America, and you are no longer a part of it:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

Given the widespread unreason in this mind-numbing political season, how can one cut through the din to make a good decision on who should be our Democratic presidential candidate? It is still not that hard to go about it at least somewhat rationally. Google is your friend—or can be, if you use it in the right ways. Here is a brief tale of the strategy I adopted in my quest to decide my Arizona primary—er, “presidential preference”—vote rationally.

From the start, I pointedly refused, both in public and, importantly, to myself, to take a position until just before election day here in Arizona. I’ve learned from past elections that the intense pressure of primary season can reveal facets of a candidate’s personality and experience that are important not to miss. So, I figured, the longer I stake out uncommitted territory, the more useful things I will learn, and the better my chances of making a sound decision. Furthermore—I did not realize this until later—being firmly uncommitted meant that I had no emotional investment in any candidate. Given our well-proven human tendency to defend our own tribe no matter the context, evidence, or consequences, this was a brilliant strategy for maintaining a certain amount of level-headedness and a boon to intellectual freedom. Alas, if only I could claim this brilliance was anything but an accident! Nevertheless, this lesson turned out to be the most valuable one for me in this experience.

I am now glad I did choose this course and hold off. It both allowed and forced me to check the substance behind the things people parrot, and the things people uncritically pass around as “memes”. I found that, primarily, these things are bunk—either untrue, or twisted to say or imply something untrue, or cherry-picked out of context to represent something untrue. It is little other than collective mental garbage going in and out, in and out of flaccid brains. Motivated reasoning and confirmation bias metastasized and run amok. This cannot be healthy.

The completeness of the logic FAIL (especially of very nearly every “meme” I’ve seen) coming from a certain segment of liberaldom astonishes, when you look into it. I did not expect this degree of unreason coming from liberals. But I suppose I should have: the psychologists tell us (and have rigorously shown) that people are people, whatever their ideological leanings. We all are surprisingly susceptible to the same biases, the same cognitive foibles—left, right, maybe not so much the mythical middle. Still, it has been disappointing to learn that critical thinking is not relevant to the very people who, at least occasionally, proudly pay it lip service: the educated liberal.

_____

After a couple of months of observing the back-and-forth on Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and of chasing down the origins of some of the various topics that I care about, and of pushing back as gently but firmly as I know how against the tide of blatant unreason issuing from some of my friends, I arrived at the following conclusions (observations, really):

Bumper-sticker thinking is not helpful. But it is oh, so seductive. This is a serious problem.

Political “memes” mostly are dishonest, even false, and only encourage both lazy thinking and unproductive discord. They are like that cough that you just cannot shake, the one that at 2am you fear could be tuberculosis. Or cancer. It is easy to prove the dishonesty of most of them, but people almost never bother. Political memes are just too delicious, yet they are uniformly counterproductive.

There is no breaking through the ideological barriers of many liberals. That is, the cognitively barricaded have little interest in facts, the truth, or, especially, complex contexts and shades of meaning, if it threatens the warped world view they’ve adopted nearly wholesale from two and a half decades of incessant drum beating from the right. Rational discussion is as hopeless among them as among rabid conservatives. Neither even notices the pounding drums.

The right has largely succeeded in its long, sustained campaign of propaganda and negativity, even among liberals. Liberals, too, now unthinkingly assume the GOP’s disingenuous message framing as a matter of course, without ever questioning those false assumptions. Frank Luntz is unquestionably evil, but he is just as unquestionably brilliant.

Sanders’s consistent message is THE progressive, liberal message…and has been, since approximately forever. This is good. This is excellent. Ours is a wondrously wholesome and healthy message. We care about people, and society, and the planet we live on. Further, Sanders does not do a bad job of framing our message effectively. This is unusual for a liberal. If only we had more who can do this.

However, that’s pretty much it. To borrow a phrase, there’s little “there” there. Tastes great, less filling. Hardly a thought (although a larger amount of afterthought) is given to how we might usefully set about accomplishing any of the things Sanders drones on about—how to take plausible, substantive steps towards our shared liberal goals—given our current reality.

This reality consists of past, present, and promised intransigence, nastiness, belligerent ignorance, blatant lies and cheating, unrelenting callousness, narcissism, and frequent infantilism among conservatives, as well as the sad fact that conservatives continue to control most of our country—Senate, House, Supreme Court, state legislatures, and state governorships. And it is unlikely any of this context is going to change much.

So, bzzzt. This glaring yet persistent absence of substance, of a realistic plan moving forward, has been a deal-breaker for me.

Clinton, however, plausibly claims to be about realistic (well, in large part based on realistic) solutions for making substantive progress toward the same goals, but taking into account our current reality (ding ding ding ding ding!), as I think any thinking person must. Short on pizazz, but pragmatic. This matters.

Hillary Rodham Clinton has baggage. Big baggage. But the overwhelming majority of it ranges from mostly to completely bogus—nonsense, lies, and disingenuous exaggeration. That’s what over two decades of asinine, rapid-fire Republican attacks, ignorance, and dishonest agendas will pile on a person, especially if that person is competent (not to mention a woman), and especially when the media doesn’t do its journalism job (which abilities it willingly allowed to atrophy several decades ago). Follow up on any so-called “criticism” of HRC (as proclaimed by either Republicans or Sanders supporters), and you discover that—surprise!—95% of it is bullshit.

HRC is likely more conservative than I am comfortable with on several important matters: many areas of foreign policy, a few areas of economic policy. (But no problems in her domestic policies that strike me as worrisome.)

However, HRC also:

has a buttload of experience in combat politics (Sanders has none); she is thoroughly battle tested,

has an extra crap-ton of experience in dealing with and circumventing Republican assholery (Sanders has none),

knows, and can adroitly handle, most if not all of the main players in the DC machinery (sorry, Bernie fans, but this matters),

recognizes, readily acknowledges, and thinks strategically about the complex real world in which every policy decision resides (Sanders does not seem to understand—or at least acknowledge—that the real world is hugely complex),

has a well-proven titanium spine (Sanders: indeterminate, as he’s never been tested), and

appears to be, mostly out of public view, a genuinely warm human, despite all she’s been through.

Hillary Clinton cannot frame a message effectively to save her life. This is unfortunate, for us all, and it unfairly hurts her in the polls. But to my mind this is not a valid deal-breaker since it does not affect the indomitable substance of what she brings to the table. It does, however, make it more difficult to uncover that substance from among all the bogus dreck. That’s on us: our failure has been and continues to be intellectual laziness.

Sanders appears to be inflexible, unable to adapt much to a shifting, changing context. I suspect HRC is no yoga master, but Sanders is mineralized through and through. Has he substantively changed, in any way, in forty years? Perhaps he’s never been forced by circumstances to look at things differently to achieve a longer goal. This is a problem for me.•
I recently tried to explain this to a good psychologist friend (we went to their wedding in Thailand, even). He stopped me midstream and said that in psychology research circles this is a quantitatively well-studied thing and has a label: cognitive rigidity. He was pretty pleased to teach me something new. He also agreed that he, too, sees Sanders as notably rigid (his words: Sanders would likely score high on the scale of cognitive rigidity). That dawning in my head the week before our voting day I think is what clinched my evolving decision. If you can’t adapt, you won’t be effective.

_____

So I voted for Clinton.

_____

Idolatry† is not my thing. I must admit that I am sick and tired of pervasive Bernie Sanders cult worship. Few if any in the Sanders crowd (at least any more) seem to actually think, and do research, with a serious eye toward considering the evidence as a dispassionate, unbiased observer. It seems to be mostly about seeking and sharing only those superficial fragments and tidbits that agree with predetermined opinions. This is not thinking.

The left-right divide disappears not only in the moderate middle but also in the mental rigidity of fascism (from reddit, click to enlarge).

Further, you can trace the origins of most of the negativity and slime thrown at Hillary Clinton—regardless of who is flinging it today—directly back to Republicans (they play dirty, remember?). But, still…liberals? Misinformation and willful ignorance have been running rampant, even among us, and especially among Sanders zealots, who, in terms of blind ideology, are little different from conservatives (see graphic). The content is opposite, but the cognitive rigidity on display is the same. Further, voting primarily with your gonads (many conservatives do this) or your adrenal glands (Berniebots, that’s you) is not just unwise, irrational, counterproductive, intellectually dishonest—all true—but also unethical, in that abandoning your responsibility as a citizen to your fellow citizens, and to our shared society, is unethical.

This continues to surprise me, our abandonment of critical thinking; I just can’t seem to wrap my head around it yet. A sustained, twenty-five year barrage of shameless negative falsehoods and bullshit from the Republican machine, faithfully parroted by the mainstream media, must inevitably bias all of our perceptions and assumptions. Maybe that is the explanation. GIGO. But shouldn’t at least we, the educated liberal, be well aware of this bias?

It has been a disheartening several months.† excessive or blind adoration, reverence, devotion.

_____

Here are a few resources I found helpful while pondering (mostly alphabetical by title). I will update this list sporadically, as I come across useful new articles. Latest update: 21 April 2016.

Recently, Atheist Republic (AR) posted this image (⇒) in response to the Supreme Court’s decision (pdf) that legalizes marriage in the U.S. It is a Photoshopped image of the Kaaba in Mecca. The reaction from noisome elements of the Muslim community has been, predictably, swift, violent, and largely incoherent (cf. the Facebook post or AR’s original Twitter post for a sampling). AR’s post is fine; I think it is timely, in good taste, and makes a good point. However, I think AR made a mistake.

AR responded to the growing shit storm in a subsequent post on their web site (WARNING: one image, about ¾ of the way into the post, is deeply disturbing†), electing to show a number of select examples of the insults and threats they’ve received to make a point:

Please keep in mind that these aren’t members of ISIS or Al-Qaeda making these statements, but rather are your everyday average Muslim.

Later:

…these aren’t extremists or jihadists, they’re just average Muslims. These are the ones who call themselves “moderate”.

And, if you are feeling particularly thick-headed:

To make it clear that these are supposed “moderate” Muslims, I’d like to point out that we know for a fact that one of these men is a US citizen. This particular commenter has specifically asked for information from one of our admins that he suspects lives in his area, and threatened said admin with physical violence against this admin and their family.

A skewed distribution (click to embiggen). Where do you think IPLs reside?

One thought kept nagging me as I read AR’s response: AR furnishes no valid evidence or argument to support the all-too-common claim that these select nutballs are “your everyday average Muslim” (as opposed to the crazies that carry out terrorist attacks in the name of their religion or, more accurately, their ignorant, deranged ideology‡). It seems likely to me that the cretinous whackjobs sprinkling AR’s posts with turds are neither average nor representative of Muslims in general. These whackjobs are—like our own noisome right-wing nutballs—an abnormally incoherent, ignorant, and vocal minority. I’ve no doubt average Muslims are as willingly delusion-controlled as our average Christians here in the U.S., but I have to question that the infantile profane loudmouths of either organized delusion system lie anywhere near the peaks (i.e., the modes) of their respective population distributions.

The excerpts above—and, indeed, AR’s entire argument—illustrate several common logical fallacies. In the first two excerpts, the author is arguing by assertion. This is a counterproductive rhetorical tactic. It raises people’s hackles, to your disadvantage.

The third excerpt is somewhat more interesting. First, it cherry-picks an anecdotal example. (The example itself also seems hardly relevant—a red herring.) This is a surprising mistake, since cherry-picking is perhaps the most common logical fallacy for which rationalists such as AR criticize religionists and the right-wing.

In this excerpt the author also equates being a U.S. citizen with being “moderate”, with no supporting argument or evidence. As recent events in the U.S. have shown repeatedly, there is nothing moderate about the beliefs of U.S. terrorists, Muslim or not. This is a false equivalence, perhaps the second most common logical fallacy employed by the right (or maybe the third, behind strawman argument).

This is not an apology for “average” adherents to horrifically damaging organized delusion systems. From all that I’ve seen, Western religions are among the most senseless and destructive invented concepts in the history of humankind. But accuracy, precision, and validity in our claims and arguments, whatever the context, matter.

We rationalists are—or should be—better than this.

† Seriously, you do not need to see this image—it cannot be unseen.

‡ Speaking of crazies, is there much, if any, difference between a Muslim terrorist who slaughters innocents in a medical treatment building and, say, a Christian terrorist who slaughters innocents in an African American church? Or between that (or any other) Muslim terrorist and a Christian terrorist who shoots dead a medical doctor during church services?